After bouncing around and landing with the A's, can the first baseman bounce back in 2015?

Ummm… what now? An entire fantasy player profile about Ike Davis? The guy that returned a whopping $8 of NL-only value last year? The guy who’s currently going as the thirty-eighth first baseman off the board in early NFBC drafts, behind the Yonder Alonsos and Mitch Morelands of the world? Yeah, that’s the guy. He doesn’t deserve that kind of a draft day fate. Walk with me. Let’s talk about Ike Davis, and why he shouldn’t be that irrelevant to your 2015 plans.

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White Sox ace Chris Sale deals with injury issues, plus the action from Monday and what to watch today.

The Monday Takeaway
When Travis Wood stepped to the plate in the bottom of the second inning of yesterday’s Diamondbacks-Cubs series opener, he had six career home runs and a chance to do what few major-league pitchers even dream of. The left-hander slugged half of those half-dozen big flies last year—including one each of the solo, two-run, and grand slam varieties. He needed a three-run blast to complete the home-run cycle.

In the debut edition, Jeff looks at the DH options of the NL clubs who will visit AL parks and the lineup changes for AL clubs losing the DH.

I am excited to introduce our weekly fantasy baseball Interleague Report. With interleague play now being year-round, we can benefit from keeping tabs on teams that have played or will be playing games in opposing leagues. The plan is to give you helpful info whether it relates to daily or weekly lineups, waiver or FAAB pickups, or changes in positional eligibility. The Interleague Report will cover last week, this week, and the following week.

These players excelled from July through the end of the regular season, but does that mean great things are in store in 2014?

It’s relatively easy to tell when a player has a full-on breakout. Matt Carpenter and Paul Goldschmidt both had easily the strongest seasons of their respective careers in 2013—it doesn’t take a baseball genius to figure that out. However, every pre-season, there is always be a lot of talk about how a player had a “breakout second half,” leading to talk that they will be able to build off that experience in the following season. At face value, that makes sense. But at face value, we’re also clearly dealing with sample size issues. For every Jose Bautista and Josh Donaldson, who hinted at their offensive explosions towards the end of the prior season, there are many more who never capitalize on said promise.

For the purposes of this exercise, we’re going to be looking at hitters with a .900+ OPS during the second half of the previous season in at least 100 plate appearances. But before we dig into the 2013 members of this group, we’re going to take it one step further and look back at the last couple of seasons to see exactly how this control group fared.

Fast forward to April, and these players might tempt you if they're sitting on your league's waiver wire.

With only four days left in the regular season, I’m going to do a slightly different take on our usual Free Agent Watch column before we morph into off-season mode. But speaking of off-season mode, I know even the most loyal BP readers are used to the fantasy section taking a couple of months off when the season ends. So my deepest apologies to those of you who were looking forward to time away from us—under my reign of terror as Fantasy Content Manager, you will be subjected to year-round fantasy analysis. And that includes some new things that I am very excited about.

But back to the task at hand, we are going around the diamond to spot players who are worthy of picking up in dynasty and high-volume keeper leagues with an eye squarely on 2014. And if the names I’m highlighting aren’t deep enough for some of you, I’ll be including a deep sleeper at each position as well (and if those aren’t deep enough for you, then you’re just going to have to be OK with that). In the words of future Poet Laureate Mike Skinner, let’s…push…things…forward.

Lawrie had an excellent 2011 major-league debut (albeit one tempered by two separate hand injuries that cost him more than a month’s worth of games), posting a .293/.373/.580 line with nine homers and seven steals in 171 plate appearances. Fantasy owners gobbled him up in the early rounds of the 2012 draft—even in expert leagues—and Lawrie seemed to be paying them off over the first half of the season. Through the end of June, he was hitting .293/.341/.438 with eight longballs and 11 steals in 320 plate appearances.